Overcoming Dyslexia

From one of the world's leading experts on reading and dyslexia comes the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and practical book yet to help one understand, identify, and overcome the reading problems that plague American children today. For the one in every five children who has dyslexia and the millions of others who struggle to read at their own grade levels, as well as for their parents, teachers, and tutors, this book can make a difference.

The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child's Confidence and Love of Learning

While other books tell you what dyslexia is, this book tells you what to do. Dyslexics' innate skills, which may include verbal, social, spatial, kinesthetic, visual, mathematical, or musical abilities, are their unique key to acquiring knowledge. Figuring out where their individual strengths lie, and then harnessing these skills, offers an entrée into learning and excelling. And by keeping the focus on learning, not on standard reading the same way everyone else does, a child with dyslexia can and will develop the self-confidence to flourish in the classroom and beyond.

The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain

Dyslexia is almost always assumed to be an obstacle. And for one in five people who are dyslexic, it can be. Yet for millions of successful dyslexics - including astrophysicists, mystery novelists, and entrepreneurs - their dyslexic differences are the key to their success. In this paradigm-shifting book, neurolearning experts Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide describe exciting new brain science revealing that dyslexic people have unique brain structure and organization.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science - from Descartes and the Enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stuart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley - Foer exposes the dark underpinnings of our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy.

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

In The Book Whisperer, Miller takes us inside her sixth grade classroom to reveal the secrets of her powerful but unusual instructional approach. Rejecting book reports, comprehension worksheets, and other aspects of conventional instruction, Miller embraces giving students an individual choice in what they read, combined with a program for independent reading. She also focuses on building a classroom library of high-interest books, and above all on modeling appropriate and authentic reading behaviors.

How Proust Can Change Your Life

For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association....

Reading in the Wild: The Book Whisperer's Keys to Cultivating Lifelong Reading Habits

Teaching students to become lifelong readers. A companion to the bestselling The Book Whisperer, Reading in the Wild explores whether or not we are truly instilling lifelong reading habits in our students and provides practical strategies for teaching "wild" reading. Based on survey responses from over 900 adult readers and classroom feedback, Reading in the Wild offers solid advice and strategies on how to develop, encourage and assess key lifelong reading habits, including dedicating time for reading, planning for future reading, and defining oneself as a reader.

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts

How does the brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state.

The Gift of Dyslexia: Why Some of the Smartest People Can't Read and How They Can Learn

This program explains the concepts of Davis Dyslexia Correction® for people who would rather listen than read. At the age of 38, Ronald D. Davis made a discovery about a perception that enabled him to read a book cover to cover - for the first time. The methods he developed have helped thousands of children and adults around the world to overcome reading, writing, study, and attention problems.

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

While most of us might take dictionaries for granted, the process of writing them is in fact as lively and dynamic as language itself. With sharp wit and irreverence, Kory Stamper cracks open the complex, obsessive world of lexicography - from the agonizing decisions about what and how to define to the knotty questions of usage in an ever-changing language.

Refugee

This timely and powerful novel tells the story of three different children seeking refuge. Josef is a Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world. Isabel is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to find safety in America. Mahmoud is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe.

Taking Charge of ADHD, Third Edition: The Complete, Authoritative Guide for Parents

From distinguished researcher/clinician Russell A. Barkley, this treasured parent resource gives you the science-based information you need about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and its treatment. It also presents a proven eight-step behavior management plan specifically designed for six- to 18-year-olds with ADHD. Offering encouragement, guidance, and loads of practical tips, Dr. Barkley helps you make sense of your child's symptoms, get an accurate diagnosis, and more.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Emotions feel automatic to us; that's why scientists have long assumed that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications not only for psychology but also medicine, the legal system, airport security, child-rearing, and even meditation.

Swann's Way

Swann’s Way is the first of seven volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It sets the scene with the narrator’s memories being famously provoked by the taste of that little cake, the madeleine, accompanied by a cup of lime-flowered tea. It is an unmatched portrait of fin-de-siècle France.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

What is human consciousness, and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture.

The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis

What can we still learn from C.S. Lewis? Find out in these 12 insightful lectures that cover the author's spiritual autobiography, novels, and his scholarly writings that reflect on pain and grief, love and friendship, prophecy and miracles, and education and mythology.

How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

From an early age, it is drilled into our heads: Restlessness, distraction, and ignorance are the enemies of success. We’re told that learning is all self-discipline, that we must confine ourselves to designated study areas, turn off the music, and maintain a strict ritual if we want to ace that test, memorize that presentation, or nail that piano recital. But what if almost everything we were told about learning is wrong?

Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.

Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)

Words on the Move opens our eyes to the surprising backstories to the words and expressions we use every day. Did you know that silly once meant "blessed"? Or that ought was the original past tense of owe? Or that the suffix -ly in adverbs is actually a remnant of the word like? And have you ever wondered why some people from New Orleans sound as if they come from Brooklyn?

Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World

In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators.

Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them

School discipline is broken. Too often, the kids who need our help the most are viewed as disrespectful, out of control, and beyond help, and are often the recipients of our most ineffective, most punitive interventions. These students - and their parents, teachers, and administrators - are frustrated and desperate for answers. Dr. Ross W. Greene, author of the acclaimed book The Explosive Child, offers educators and parents a different framework for understanding challenging behavior.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.

Oaxaca Journal

Oliver Sacks is well known as an explorer of the human mind - a neurologist with a gift for complex, insightful portrayals of people and their conditions. However, he is also a card-carrying member of the American Fern Society, and since childhood has been fascinated by these primitive plants and their ability to survive and adapt in many climates. Oaxaca Journal is Sacks' spellbinding account of his trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Publisher's Summary

Interweaving her vast knowledge of neurology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy with fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, developmental psychologist, neuroscientist, and dyslexia expert Wolf probes the question, "How do we learn to read and write?" This ambitious and provocative new book offers an impassioned look at reading, its effect on our lives, and explains why it matters so greatly in a digital era.

What the Critics Say

"Wolf's alarm about the spread of semi- literacy among the young is obviously justified, and her book provokes thought about it as only reading can." (Sunday Times London)"Blindingly fascinating...detailed and scholarly....There's a lot of difficult material in here. But it's worth the effort....For people interested in language, this is a must. You'll find yourself focusing on words in new ways. Read it slowly--it will take time to sink in." (The Sunday Telegraph)

A fascinating exploration into how the brain learns to read and to write. This is not dry science but a mix of stories and complex theory on how the brain works and why things go wrong as in dyslexia.

I think the title has to do with the contrast between the high functioning exploration of thoughts and detail, the Proust part of the title, and the base, more automatic functioning of a simple creature like the Squid. Much of reading and writing is a mix of these two ends of the spectrum. An interplay of the automatic and the carefully focused and dwelt upon. Just a thought.

I throughly enjoyed the book and Potters narration. Recommended if you like seeing things you do each day explored and explained by an expert.

"Proust and the Squid" is the title of this book, but I am not certain why. Here, Maryanne Wolf sets out to describe how reading came into being, the human brains adaptation to accommodate that process, and how children learn to read. This is well worth the listeners' time and will reward the effort, but it has little to do with Prouse (or squid for that matter).

That said, there are passages which are technical. Those are handled well by Wolf and I hope that she will continue to write for the general public. Over time, she will develop a lighter style. Her topic is certainly important to all of us and she needs to heard.

I personally want to hear more about her theories concerning how access to Google, the World Wide Web and other technology will change our culture and how we process information. She hints at changes that might be on the horizon, but left me wanting to hear more.

The second half of the book is devoted to dyslexia. I benefited greatly from hearing what she has to say. However, the second half did really link to the sections which preceeded. The first and second sections were related to "reading" but could have been separate works. I hope that she will develop a book on dyslexia alone. She speculates that the human brain has adapted to accommodate reading. The dyslexia is a through back to the past. I would like to know more.

I was amazed at how captivating would a book on reading be, at how enlightening some of the facts about the culture and the neurology of reading are.
I was amazed at the number of times I have cited this book since reading it. It seems to be relevant to so many areas of our lives and our culture, as if reading is a metaphor for everything else.
I highly recommend this gem of a book. The writing is great, the reading is great, the lesson learnt is amazing.

This book does such an excellent job of identifying how the reading process works, from early reading skills like onset, rhyme, and phonemic awareness to the more complicated aspects of reading like fluency and comprehension. It also provides a clear understanding of the different subtypes of dyslexia, as well as the latest neuroscience on the reading brain, dyslexia, and The strengths typically associated with people in the dyslexic community.

My interests run to psychology, popular science, history, world literature, and occasionally something fun like Jasper Fforde. It seems like the only free time I have for reading these days is when I'm in the car so I am extremely grateful for audio books. I started off reading just the contemporary stuff that I was determined not to clutter up my already stuffed bookcases with. And now audio is probably 90% of my "reading" matter.

Sadly the premise turns out to be misleading. I thought this would be a book about the neuroscience of the brain as it related to reading. That does come up in this book, but primarily this is a book about child development. Oddly, it's not the kind of book that would be targeted toward parents or teachers or other researchers. I'm not sure who she thought her audience would be. It seems to be the sort of monograph on a particular field by someone with so much enthusiasm that she just can't help herself. I have to admit that there were quite a few bits of the book that I found mildly interesting. However, so much of the book felt repetitive, if not obvious, that it was hard to get excited about it. One of the interesting things was that she paid serious attention to Socrates's concerns about the potential dangers of reading. Most of the time, she seems more concerned with diagnosing and rescuing children with reading disabilities. However, just the fact that she was open to discussing the pitfalls of reading in overall intellectual development is a point in her favor. For someone who spends so much time on the problems of dyslexia, there is precious little discussion of what can actually be done about it or how effective it is. One thing I really liked about this book is the quotations she came up with at the start of each chapter. Of course, in an audiobook, it is sometimes hard to tell where the narrator is lapsing into a quote. In particular, this one from Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." The title continues to baffle me. The Proust thing almost makes sense, but what's up with the squid? Better she should have given it a typical monograph title: "A review of the current state of research on the early acquisition of reading skills among young children in the first 7 years of life with digressions on the historical origin of writing, personal reflections on the rewards of reading, observations on related work in neuroscience, with special emphasis on dyslexia."

This was a really interesting book but I think that I would have enjoyed it more in print. There are diagrams that the print book has to illustrate what the author is discussing and I think this is the type of book that I would have wanted to underline and make notes in the margin. A truly fascinating subject matter and well written. You can tell the writer is passionate.

Where does Proust and the Squid rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

It was excellent, but all of my audiobooks have been excellent so far. It was technical, not a story really, but it was time and effort well-spent.

Have you listened to any of Kirsten Potter’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I have never listened to Kirsten Potter before, but I thought she was perfect in her reading of this book.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I was very excited by the information in this book, both about the brain and its elasticity and about the reading process itself. Enthusiasm was almost a constant emotion as I listened to the book and learned amazing information.

Any additional comments?

I have already started listening to it again, and I ordered the book so I am able to read it for myself (over the summer when I am not teaching and have more free time). There were numerous times I wanted to highlight passages and annotate!

I found this book fascinating. It's very scientific, and you do have to concentrate hard, but the author really explores how we learn to read, what happens in our brains when we do; how reading developed; and then goes on to explore why these things go wrong and what causes dyslexia etc. I would have given it 5 stars - but it is a book that is, unsurprisingly, written to be read rather than listened to. This occasionally leads to the frustration of being asked to read a passage and see what happens - when, of course, all you can do is sit and listen (and Ms Wolf is clear to point out that listening fires different centres in your brain to those fired up by reading). If you are interested in what goes on in the little grey cells when you pick up a book - and it is quite literally mind blowing - then this is an accessible and fascinating listen.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Kevin

Crowborough, East Sussex, United Kingdom

7/10/09

Overall

"Inspiring Science!"

Being a sucker for a quirky title I was instantly drawn to this book only to find there is more hard science in it than would normally be to my taste. Admittedly much of the scientific terminology does pass me by but the author makes very clear the potential implications of the science which is the bit I'm interested in.

I find the authors concern for literacy a little worthy as her own analysis of would seem to suggest we are heading for a new form of literacy rather than some form of "sub-literate" state. It's not a barrier though and the the book is both informative, moving and inspiring.

Other texts which touch on dyslexia I find a little patronising whereas this one is not.

A wonderful listen that I'd recommend to every educator, parent and person interested in language and reading (for the educators I'd make it compulsory).

2 of 3 people found this review helpful

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